


It is something eternal

by sarahcakes613



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Jewish Character, M/M, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:15:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28939809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahcakes613/pseuds/sarahcakes613
Summary: Rafael discovers something about his heritage.
Relationships: Rafael Barba/Dominick "Sonny" Carisi Jr.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	It is something eternal

Rafael stands in the doorway of his grandmother’s apartment. It’s still full of furniture, still filled with the things she loved to surround herself with, but it feels empty and lifeless.

“Hey,” a voice from his left, soft and sweet. “We don’t have to do this tonight.”

He takes a deep breath, smiling up at his partner. “Yeah, we do,” he says.

The rental management company had been sympathetic in a cold and efficient way, but this is New York City, and they’re not keen to let an apartment sit unrented for long. The mere thought of going through her mother’s things had brought Lucia to her knees, which is why Rafael and Sonny are here instead, armed with bags and boxes and packing tape.

They’ve already agreed that the majority of the items will remain until tomorrow, when a truck will come to take all of the furniture, clothing, and household miscellanea and deliver them to an organization that collects items for refugee and immigrant families. Tonight is just for the personal items, for Rafael to pack up all of Catalina’s personal papers, her photo albums, for him to numbly go through her closet and shelves and decide what is emotionally valuable enough to keep in the family.

“Where do you want me to start?” Sonny asks as they finally walk in and close the door behind them.

Rafael looks around. There’s a desk in the living room from where Catalina paid all of her bills, so that’s where he needs to be. He tries to think methodically about what they want to take away tonight.

“She had cookbooks.” He says. “Family cookbooks that were passed down that she brought from Cuba. I think some even came with the family from Spain. My mother should have those.”

Sonny nods and takes an empty box into the kitchen.

Rafael tries to lose himself in the monotony of utility bills and Christmas cards from years past. His pile for recycling and shredding grows higher than his pile for keeping, and as he rummages through the drawers his mental list of people to call and accounts to cancel grows as well.

“Hey, Diaz was your grandma’s married name, right?” Sonny calls as he walks out of the kitchen with a book in his hand.

“Hm?” Rafael looks up. “Yeah, why?”

He gestures to the book in his hand. “A lot of these cookbooks have the name Catalina Perez inscribed on the inside cover.”

Rafael frowns. “That must have been her maiden name. I don’t think I ever knew it, my grandmother didn’t talk about her family very much.”

He turns back to the drawer of hanging files, skimming to see if there are any personal records. There’s one thin file labeled “ _certificados_ ” in Catalina’s spidery handwriting. There is his grandfather’s death certificate, their marriage certificate, brittle and yellowed. He chuckles at his mother’s Confirmation record, her name scribbled on the paper in bubbly teenage writing. There are no birth records, which doesn’t surprise him. His mother will have hers, and Catalina’s probably disappeared somewhere along the route from Cuba.

There is one more record, another death certificate that he doesn’t recognize. Isaac Perez, born in Havana in 1901, died there in 1954. Rafael does the math. In 1954, his grandmother was in Miami, his mother would have been just starting school. This man must be his great-grandfather. There is no cause of death listed and he wonders at what it was that caused a man so young to die, wonders if that is why his grandmother never spoke about him.

There’s writing under the man’s name that Rafael doesn’t recognize, a weird cursive script he’s never seen before, and he takes his phone out to take a picture of it for his translation app. Maybe it’s a variant of Cyrillic, he knows the Russians were heavily involved in Cuban politics for a time.

As it loads, he looks over at Sonny, who’s seated on the faded floral couch, a small stack of clothbound books next to him. He’s frowning slightly as he flips through them.

“Not finding any recipes to your liking?” He asks, joking.

“What?” Sonny blinks at him. “Oh, no, it’s uh. There’s some interesting stuff in here, actually. Some of these go back to the turn of the 20th century, there’s even one with recipes from the 1800’s. It’s just weird, your family was in Cuba that whole time, right?”

“Yeah, both sides. Right back to when it was still a Spanish colony.”

Sonny nods. “I’m obviously not the expert here, but you ever see an entire Cuban cookbook without any _lechon_ recipes? Without any recipes using pork at all, actually?”

Rafael’s phone beeps as he thinks about it and he looks down at the language app, which has translated the text on his great-grandfather’s death certificate. He stares uncomprehendingly at the result for a moment.

“Huh.” He says, and then he looks at Sonny. “I think I might know why there are no pork recipes in those cookbooks.”

He tilts the phone screen so Sonny can see the result. Translated from a variant script of Hebrew into English, the text reads, _Isaac ben Moshe HaLevi_.

Sonny reads it out loud and then looks at Rafael.

“Wait, does this mean?”

Rafael nods, sitting back in the plastic folding chair. “My grandmother was Jewish.”

Sonny’s mouth flaps silently for a minute. “But that means…”

“Yeah,” Rafael can feel his mouth making shapes, a tremulous sort of grimace. “So am I.”

* * *

His mother isn’t interested in discussing it.

“Of course we’re not Jewish,” she mutters as she affixes stamps to thank you cards. “We’re Catholic, we always have been.”

Rafael had been up all night reading, and he’s not so sure he agrees.

“I don’t think abuelita’s family started out Catholic, mami,” he argues. “I think they were conversos.”

She glares at him. “What does it matter?” She huffs. “It doesn’t change anything.”

It doesn’t change anything, but it changes everything.

* * *

He finds himself in the office of Rabbi Angel, emeritus at _Shearith Israel_.

“We’re the oldest active Jewish congregation in the country,” the rabbi says, nudging a plate of cinnamon cookies toward him. “Established by Jews who came to New Amsterdam via Dutch Brazil.”

“I did some reading,” Rafael says, feeling oddly like he’s a student again. The rabbi nods encouragingly. “This was also known as the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue?”

Rabbi Angel nods again. It’s a gesture he repeats a lot, Rafael notices, a quiet way of showing his interest in the discussion when Rafael is speaking.

“Spanish and Portuguese Jewish culture is very different from Eastern European Jewish culture,” he explains. “The ritualistic elements especially. Our congregation reflects that, even today.”

Rafael shows him some of the cookbooks, points out what Sonny had noticed about the meat. The rabbi hums and nods.

“I also see very little in the way of milk and meat mixing,” he points out. “Whoever devised these recipes was clearly trying to keep kosher in as safe a way as possible.”

Even before spending late nights on Wikipedia, Rafael’s been vaguely aware of the Spanish Inquisition, of the massacres and forced conversions of non-Christians in Spain in the late Medieval period and during the Renaissance.

“If you’re interested, I can get you in touch with an organization in the Southwest, they have a number of resources for tracing family histories.” The rabbi offers, and Rafael pauses before accepting.

On the one hand, his mother is right, it doesn’t really change anything. She is devotedly Catholic and he is vehemently lapsed, and neither of them is terribly interested in shifting their worldviews. But still, it would be interesting to know more about his grandmother’s heritage.

He smiles politely when the rabbi extends an invitation to sabbath services but they both know he won’t show up.

* * *

All the same, something does change in him, something clicking into place that he didn’t know was out of alignment.

He tries to explain it to Sonny one night in bed.

“I never felt comfortable in the church, even as a child, and I always assumed it was because I was gay.”

Sonny nuzzles at his temple. “And what, now you think maybe it’s because you always knew it wasn’t really who you were?”

He shrugs. “There are theories out there about genetic memory. Maybe there’s something to it.” He picks at a loose thread in the blanket. “It also makes sense when I think about some of her superstitions. When my grandfather died, she covered all the mirrors in the house. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I was just a boy, but we didn’t do that for my father’s parents.”

“You know I’d support you if you wanted to get more involved, right?” Sonny tilts his face to gaze into his eyes. “I fell in love with you as a lapsed Catholic, it’s not going to make a difference to me if you start going to church on Saturdays.”

“Synagogue,” Rafael corrects absently. “And thank you. I’m not sure what to do with this information, if I’m being honest. Knowing my heritage isn’t what I thought…I’m still me. I still don’t know if I believe in God, and I still do know I don’t have much time for laws written by men claiming that they were divinely inspired.”

Sonny kisses his temple again. “Well, you don’t need to make any decisions right now. As long as you know I’m here no matter what.”

Rafael turns as Sonny goes to buss his hairline again, catching his lips in a soft kiss.

“I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> I used the tag "original character", but Rabbi Angel is a real person and his synagogue is real as well. I have no idea what he's like IRL, though I'm sure he's a lovely man. As a rabbi for an S&P congregation, it wouldn't surprise me if he's been approached by people like Rafael more than once in his career.  
> I had this idea based on a rather silly whim back in July but the more it sat with me the more the possibilities intrigued me. What Barba goes through here is a very real thing that has happened to people. The connection to food as a long-lasting reminder of heritage is also a very real thing, and I was inspired especially by the book Recipes of my 15 Grandmothers by Genie Milgrom - she's also written a memoir about discovering her converso heritage and I highly recommend it if you're interested in memoirs and self-discovery journeys.  
> There's a ton of information out there if this is a topic you want to read more about and I really highly suggest you do. The loss and rediscovery of Spanish Jewish culture is incredibly fascinating and it's still ongoing. One estimation puts the number of 15th-ct conversos at about 250,000. One DNA study showed that somewhere around 5% of people in Latin America share a distinct Sephardic ancestry.


End file.
